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Author Nabokov's Book
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Bend Sinister
In a nameless East European nation, Krug, a philosophy professor in his 40s, has lost his wife in surgery just as a revolution has brought a repressive dictatorship to power. The revolutionary tyrant, Paduk, a childhood schoolmate of Krug's, needs the academic star's blessing to help legitimize his power grab, and starts having his men arrest and eliminate the people around the professor, up to and including Krug's 8-year-old son David, in order to force...Despair
Hermann Karlovich, an unsuccessful businessman and wannabe artist, meets who he believes to be his physically identical doppleganger and is inspired to commit the perfect crime/artistic act: murdering "himself." As with most of Nabokov's work, DESPAIR is an extended meditation on artists, the mutability of perception, and the fictional artifice that structures both the life an artist and his artistic creations. Hermann Karlovich is an extreme manifestati...Glory
Martin Edelweiss flees Soviet Russia with his mother in 1919 and enjoys his new cultured, literate life in Western Europe, but a few personal setbacks stir in him a dangerous and potentially self-destructive impulse to sneak back into his native country. Martin's childhood in St. Petersburg in pre-World War I Russia is comfortable. His family is middle-class. They have plenty to eat and aren't living in the streets, and while he feels little love for his...Invitation to a Beheading
Cincinnatus C., a citizen of an unnamed country, is condemned to death for the existential crime of "gnostical turpitude", and the novel relates his final days in prison leading up to his execution. With strong parallels to Kafka's work, especially THE TRIAL, Cincinnatus's crime is never fully articulated. Gnostical turpitude essentially means a kind of malaise or failing related to spiritual/ontological knowledge. Or to put it more simply, the ways Cinc...

Nabokov booklist

King, Queen, Knave
A poor young man, sent to live and work with his uncle in Berlin, falls in love with his uncle's wife and gets caught up in her ambitious, yet incompetent plot to kill the uncle and take over his business. Franz Bubendorf grew up in a small town in the German countryside. With little money and fewer prospects, his uncle's successful department store in Berlin is his only real option for bettering himself. His uncle, Dreyer, agrees to help him, and even o...Laughter in the Dark
This book is an examination of the various states and levels of blindness, both literal and metaphoric. It tells the story of a middle-aged art critic who seduces, and is seduced in turn, by an underage wannabe actress and the desperate unraveling of his life that ensues. Albert Albinus should be happy with his life. As a respected art critic in Berlin, he has a good wife, a nice home, decent wealth, and the satisfaction that comes from being at the top ...Lolita (Literature)
Humbert Humbert is a European academic who comes to America and who has a penchant for nymphets--young girls. When he sees the young Dolores Haze he marries her mother so that he can be close to her. When her mother dies, he seduces her and takes her on a journey across the United States. He is in love with her but she is also not innocent and soon she takes off with another pedophile called Quilty. The narrator, Humbert Humbert then goes on a journey to...Lolita (Literature)
"What I heard then was te melody of children aplay and nothing but that, and I knew that the hopless thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that chorus." Humbert Humbert, Lolita 1998. I know that's from the movie, but it sums up the book perfectly. ...Pale Fire
John Shade, a poet and English professor at a small New England college, composed an epic 999-line poem just before his death in July 1959. A colleague named Charles Kinbote, an exile from the east European nation of Zembla, befriended Shade in the final five months of his life, and filled his ear with the story of the Zemblan revolution the year before, the escape of the king to America, and the assassin who is in pursuit of said monarch, hoping Shade w...Pnin
A Russian professor feels out of place in the United States and has awkward relationships with his relatives and colleagues. Timofey Pnin is a professor who has to struggle to understand American society and to repair his relationship with his ex-wife and son. Professor Pnin teaches Russian at a university in the United States, but he is always confused by the way things work in America; for example, when the book begins, Pnin is on a train going in the...

Vladimir Nabokov list of books

The Gift
The last of Nabokov's "Russian novels", THE GIFT charts the artistic development of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a Russian emigre to Germany, and his growing, complicated relationship with the history of Russian literature. When we first meet him, Fyodor is a young writer and poet who has just had his first volume of poems published. Fyodor possesses a genuine talent, but his first book does not receive the attention and respect he both expects and deserv...The Luzhin Defense
A chess genius loses his grip on reality and begins to conflate the very fabric of his life with the logical parameters of the chessboard, reducing every person to a game piece and every action to the game's complex attacks and defenses, and soon succumbs to the mounting pressure this creates. As a boy, Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin seemed destined for nothing of any importance whatsoever. Ugly, socially inept, and withdrawn to the point of nonexistence, hi...The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
The unnamed narrator seeks to unravel the life of the mysterious writer Sebastian Knight, who was also working on a biography on another unnamed writer. This book layers the different stories of Sebastian's life, his loves, and the search for the truth by the narrator and another biographer of Sebastian Knight. The reader is never sure who is telling the story or what is real and what is fiction....The Vane Sisters
A teacher struggles with the ghosts of a former student and her sister. The narrator of "The Vane Sisters" is a French teacher at an all-girls college, and he comes across a suicide note from one of his students disguised as part of her French essay. He rushes to stop her as soon as he finds it, but he shows up too late. His student killed herself because she couldn't stand the thought of life without her married lover, and said lover showed no signs of ...